Day: August 1, 2011

Last Saturday, WABA staff and volunteers joined The Riverside Center in hosting a community bike party in the neighborhoods of Lincoln Heights and Deanwood in Northeast DC.

This area is home to one of DC’s hidden gems, the Marvin Gaye Park Trail. Nestled in the newly restored Watts Branch corridor, this 1.6-mile linear park offers countless social amenities, including a stage, two community gardens, a peanut park, two playgrounds, basketballs courts and baseballs diamonds, a restored stream and thriving community organizations like The Riverside Center.

Cyclists of all ages spent the afternoon learning how to work on their bikes with volunteers from The Bike House, before setting off as a group on a leisurely ride along the trail. We returned to the park hub where the Riverside Center staff awaited us with music, karaoke, fresh fruit and vegetables, and homemade smoothies from their Farmers Market. The story of Marvin Gaye Park is one of vibrant growth and we are thankful to partner with The Riverside Center, a community hub that has transformed the region through its work in the park.

It’s clear that our East of the River Initiative is drawing support from individuals and groups who share our goals and support our mission. We were also joined by two members of DC’s Bicycle Advisory Council, Ellen Jones and Jameel Alsalam, as well as Slyvia Brown, the area’s ANC chairperson. As the East of the River Initiative continues to gain traction, we hope that you, our members will continue your support by joining us at an upcoming event or donating to help us out.

Whether you bike, walk or drive around DC, it is becoming clearer and clearer that there is a traffic enforcement problem on our streets. Traffic laws are routinely violated by everybody, without repercussion, making everybody less safe. At WABA, we take the safety of bicyclists very seriously, and we’re not very fond of endangering pedestrians or drivers either. So we were thrilled to help DDOT train some of their Traffic Control Officers in bike safety and the finer points of the District’s bike laws.

DDOT’s Traffic Control Officers (TCOs) “prevent congestion through enforcement and traffic control services” and have the authority to issue citations (write tickets) to offenders. This puts them on the front lines, and with the help of a bit of bike education, makes them a powerful force to protect cyclists’ rights on DC’s streets.

WABA’s Bike Ambassador, Daniel Hoagland, has taken two full “classes” of TCOs through a condensed version of our Confident City Cycling classes, focusing on vehicular cycling and DC traffic laws regarding bicycling, as well as the District’s bike infrastructure, common enforcement errors and practices that marginalize bicyclists. After that, they saddled up and went on a 7-mile bike tour of the city. The tour included a wide variety of bicycling infrastructure and facilities, emphasizing the issues bicyclists face with current traffic enforcement in the District. Key issues included cars parked in bike lanes, driver aggression and harassment, sidewalk cycling downtown and the enforcement issues surrounding new infrastructure like the 15th St. cycle track. We’re hopeful that these men and women will start to address the lack of enforcement out on our streets, inspire bicyclists to bike safely, and promote bicycling among public officials.

Additionally, the TCOs will use their new bike skills to be more mobile, improving their response times to emergency calls and enabling them to more effectively get from the Reeves Center to their deployment locations and back. And, of course, there is one more benefit to getting these men and women onto bikes. When we asked them what they were hoping to get out of the training, their number one answer was “exercise”.